Days of no gas
From my initial analysis of my daily energy routine, it was clear that I use a lot of gas, so rethinking my cooking habits was the first step.
So I decided to make a day of not using gas.
First one is about my cooking.
I cook pasta for dinner almost every day since I came to Italy. Because I like pasta, first of all, and because it is way much cheaper here than sushi rise and it is not very difficult to cook. Before I started this challenge, my daily cooking and eating cycle was to boil the pasta on the evening, cook it with the sauce and eat it all up in the evening, because I always like to have something fresh and hot.
However, boiling pasta every time and making different sauces every time sometimes feels tedious and consumes gas with every single time. So to stop this, I decided to cook more food per time and eat it in smaller portions.
On a day of this challenge, I chose the day when I will be at home for a day next day to not waste my food, and made three servings of arrabbiata that night (dinner for that day, lunch and dinner for the next day).
Because the sauce tasted the same, on the second night I wanted to eat something different. So I added some cheese and tried to feel other flavours to change the taste.
Secondly, I outsource my meals.
As I am not working now and so that I am just consuming my savings from when I was working, cooking by myself for saving money has always been at the top of my priorities in my daily life recently.
On this day, however, I decided to buy food that had been prepared by someone else, rather than by myself.
The important thing was to buy food that had already been prepared for the customers, instead of having it cooked for you in a place like a restaurant. This is because, as well as not using their own gas, the overall energy consumption should be lower if someone cooks a lot for everyone at once in smaller portions, rather than each person consuming energy individually each time.
As a result, one of the disadvantages of this method is that if you do not eat the newly made dish, you store it in the fridge and therefore need to heat it up in the microwave or oven the next time you eat it.
However, in the first case, I found it relatively advantageous, because the gas energy consumed in one cooking and the electricity consumed to heat the food once in the microwave oven is many times higher than that of cooking with gas. It also saves water and detergent for washing dishes and utensils. And it is not so psychologically tiring. This is an important factor in my continuing with this method. Although I would have liked to eat freshly prepared food, I didn’t have to do so every time and, above all, it was easier to avoid the hassle of cooking every time. Now that a few weeks have passed, I do it this way often.
I found it difficult to use the outsourcing method because I only have small financial resources to do so, but I realised that it was a good way to think about energy and go to the local bakery instead of working hard and cooking for myself, especially when I was busy with my assignments.
